Andrew Mitchell
@chaconato.bsky.social
🇺🇳 🏳️🌈 classical music audience member since 1976, insufficiently gay, greenish-socialist, CPTSD survivor #InsertTibetanFlag
My main artistic dislike about use of video projection (whether live AI or pre-recorded) on an opera stage or in a concert hall is exactly this: the video creators/curators from all the examples I’ve seen over 20+ years have little to no understanding of the dramatic and musical pulse of the works.
Please can someone schedule Mika Kares as Sir Bertilak as soon as possible.
Film you've watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, Marvel, Disney, or Ghibli.
Drowning By Numbers 1988 Peter Greenaway
ALT: Drowning By Numbers 1988 Peter Greenaway
static.klipy.com
𝕯𝖗. 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐚 𝐌𝐮𝐢𝐫 ❌👑@theresamuir.bsky.social · 6d agoFilm you've watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, Marvel, Disney, or Ghibli.
London’s weather has taken us from short shorts to tease the guys to where’s my cashmere sweater darling in the space of two days.
A neighbour’s children in their garden are practising a new form of medieval polyphony, which I’ve named ars crassior.
Curious, or maybe not, but at the same time as my tastes in music have changed over the years, so have the main London orchestras moved their programming in the opposite direction. Only four concerts in my diary after Proms and up to end of year at RFH/QEH/Barbican.
Not that much Shakespeare in the new RSC Stratford season…
Any thoughts on the best methods/apps/books/courses in London from those recently learning Arabic from scratch please?
Morning lecture-break update: “I don’t like academics who disagree with each other other, and I don’t like Austrian art”, said the person studying on a university course about art in Vienna.
Afternoon lecture update: dog and owner, both asleep, both snoring.
Andrew Mitchell@chaconato.bsky.social · 3w agoOf course the person who has brought their miniature dog to the morning lecture has a “question which is more of a comment”.
Of course the person who has brought their miniature dog to the morning lecture has a “question which is more of a comment”.
Any of you here have experience of James Turrell’s skyspaces? I had low expectations, but found the naturally-lit Seldom Seen moderately mesmerising. Or maybe it was a good refuge from the flat Norfolk landscape, as big skies scare me.
Was highly tempted to borrow a cassock and galero and make “no-one expects the Spanish Inquisition ” remarks when I saw NG Zubarán last month, and of course the big detached head is very Gilliam.
Andrew Mitchell@chaconato.bsky.social · 2mo agoMany examples of very large sculpted heads in much earlier art in other continents and European classical antiquity. The notion that Zurbarán’s (attrib.) Colossal Head was designed for a stage set makes partial sense when knowing the chap was originally painted as bald and subsequently overpainted.
Taste update: Hinkin’s Seville orange+Maracujá marmalade has good texture (if you like fine cut), strong notes of both fruits, not too sweet but double-acidity is less welcome. Not convinced by combo, always found Maracujá better used as tart contrast to cream-based puds. Will try diff bread/butter.
Andrew Mitchell@chaconato.bsky.social · 4w agoDropped into Fred’s for some more of Hitomi-san’s Yuzu and Peqr marmalade, pure yūgen. And found this year’s trophy winner: Hinkin’s Seville orange and passionfruit marmalade, which will be on the rye sourdough with some French salted butter breakfast-time tomorrow.
Dropped into Fred’s for some more of Hitomi-san’s Yuzu and Peqr marmalade, pure yūgen. And found this year’s trophy winner: Hinkin’s Seville orange and passionfruit marmalade, which will be on the rye sourdough with some French salted butter breakfast-time tomorrow.
Chapeau noir to London’s young Goths for their devotion to the look even on the hottest days.
The UK universities crisis: "99 UK universities and 40 arts and humanities departments have undergone restructures and redundancies since 2020. The latter have been primarily concentrated in institutions that cater to students from underrepresented backgrounds, lareviewofbooks.org/article/lite...
Literature Is Not a Vibe: On ChatGPT and the Humanities | Los Angeles Review of Books
Rachele Dini discusses OpenAI’s “A Machine-Shaped Hand” and an academic sector in crisis.
lareviewofbooks.org
One imagines that audience members whose reaction to inconsequential lines or movements onstage is to erupt in a fortissimo serrated braying that makes even a raucous donkey seem more sophisticated than a crystalline Webern miniature are entirely unaware of how much disruption they cause.
MacMillan’s Mayerling a few weeks ago (with its highly sensitive choice of music from which many modern choreographers could learn), and tonight moving forward just a few years in the Dual Monarchy’s history.
IMHO the atrocious Duke of York Theatre is possibly the worst place for the transfer of Arcadia from the Older Vic, though even in that previous venue the staging in the round didn’t fit. Ticket sales for the new run look dire.
Smiling politely at the publicity and marketing drive for Cleansed at Almeida using the message that it’s “a rarely performed play hence it’s worth seeing”, rather than saying “if you found boomer Theatre of Cruelty plays too tame, come and see some Gen X ultra-violence”.
Finally regained enough functional fitness to start my 5-5-10 plan: 5k steps before breakfast, 5k before lunch, then 10k in the evening.
One of my top three goated fruit. (Other two: guava and soursop).
First part of the New Music Show’s farewell to Maida Vale (which I didn’t attend after a rude brush-off when asking about a ticket). www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...
New Music Show - Farewell to Maida Vale (1/2) - BBC Sounds
Apartment House with a special performance at BBC Maida Vale.
bbc.co.uk
Before 15:43 BST today I knew Oskar Kokoschka best as an Austrian expressionist artist and theorist, and a friend and mutual admirer of Schoenberg. Working through a stack of catalogues for recent expressionist art shows, I wondered at random about his works not often being included.
Random coincidence: I will see Rosalind Adler’s and Lea Sellers’ new play ‘Holy Fool’ at Park Theatre (about Shosty and Stalin), and less than 24 hours later will see Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal.
We don’t hear enough about Oskar Kokoschka these days.
